Not sure what you could cut to make place for it but my first thought would maybe be cut 1 experiment and 1 cotp to make room for 2 kytheon.

Would love to know what you guys think of this.

Yeah, that does seem better. I think in Modern in particular since there are so many viable decks you really have to take a look and make sure what you’re doing is either new, or you’re doing it better/in a way that is better vs. the metagame than the other decks that are doing it.

I think this is just a difference of terms. Macro-synergies, as I view them, are card pairings that have big effects and require other cards to work at all. Exarch/Twin is the archetypical macro-synergy. Through the Breach and Griselbrand/Wurm is another example. So are Tron lands. In all these cases, you have pieces of a synergy that really need the other pieces to be effective.

In Affinity, you just have a giant pile of micro-synergies. Ravager eats other artifacts and sticks counters on Inkmoth, which is also an artifact. Plating makes things big, but not because you choose to play 1-2 cards: it makes things big because you are playing an aggressive artifact deck. Same with Overseer, who doesn’t require any one or two creatures to work. It just sticks counters on everything in your deck. These are build-around cards in the loosest sense, because the build-around for them is so simple and redundant.

Affinity is a macro-synergy deck of the highest order.

Almost none of Affinities cards are good on their own, compared to the cards you mention like Thalia and Meddling Mage.

Cranial Plating, Steel Overseer and Arbound Ravager are build around cards

Is champion of the parish good enough to bother limiting your choices? Would you play anything different in this list if you weren’t trying to leverage champion/cavern (but mostly champion)?

My experience in general with champion is that it asks you to overcommit to the board to become strong which is often exactly what you don’t want to do. You want to force them to wrath without overcommitting (in matchups where the wrath might be there). Norin decks solve this by buffing champion with norin flickers, but in any other deck you need 2 more bodies to get a wild nacatl – but then if you topdeck a champion it is absolutely not a wild nacatl 🙁

IMO you need more reasons to be forcing humans than cotp and cavern. I don’t think aristocrat even counts since its actually better to just go lingering souls into aristocrat than to play a bunch of humans :S

Perhaps, but this criticism is easily expanded to almost any version of Humans we do. A Lord-heavy version is a worse Merfolk, a Company build is a worse Elves, etc. We don’t want to force the Human theme too much if other decks are already doing it better. The idea in the last list is to pick things that Humans are uniquely good at and expand from there.

In hindsight, I wish I had tested Phantasmal Image in that last list, both for its general utility and for its synergy with Champion (-2 Angel, +2 Image). I’d also up the Cavern count in a control-heavy metagame.

I also like the idea of Mardu Human lists with Magus, Thalia, Aristocrat, Champion, and cards like Xathrid Necromancer. That’s another way to make the deck more Human-oriented.